Pay for Performance: Chicken or Egg?

AFTie Ed responds to this post below on teacher pay:

My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.” What I was trying to argue is that we don’t have in place one of the essential preconditions to having an effective variable pay structure: adequate base compensation...As a result, you get a system where people are being driven to a large extent by the intrinsic rewards of the work, and by the external rewards that come from a kind of cult of teacherdom. I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, but uncompetitive pay is a factor keeping this dynamic in place.

There's an active argument going on about whether teachers are or aren't underpaid, involving lots of dueling statistics about benefit levels as a percent of salary, the number of hours worked in and out of school, which professions are fairly comparable to teaching, and whether or not a 9-month job with no vacation is really just 3/4ths of a 12-month job with vacation. But I don't think it's actually all that relevant to this discussion. I'm perfectly willing to concede that given stakes involved, and the amount of training, experience, and hard work required to do a good job teaching, public school teachers aren't paid enough, by a significant margin. And it's abundantly clear that individual teachers haven't proportionately shared in the overall growth of the economy over the last 30-plus years, in terms of salary.

That said, insisting that "adequate base compensation" be a prerequisite for pay for performance is, functionally, the equivalent of being against pay for peformance. Raising the total amount of money going to teachers salaries without changing the way teachers are paid would seem like--and to a large extent, would be--investing tens of billions of dollars in the same illogical system with nothing concrete in return. That's why NEA's call for a $40,000 base salary for all teachers, to take one example, is utter fantasy. You can say this is unjust, and you can be right, but that's the way it is. Policymakers have been blithely ignoring calls to substantially raise base tacher pay for decades now and will do it for decades more if nothing changes.

The best and most plausible strategy to increase total teacher pay, therefore, is not to raise the floor, but the ceiling--create a methodologically sound system for evaluating teacher effectiveness, in conjunction with labor, and then send the new money to the most effective teachers. Policymakers would go for that, really they would--instead of more $40,000 teachers, more $140,000 teachers. I know the "methodologically sound" part is tricky and subject to debate, but this is not an unsolveable problem. (Look for more from ES co-director Tom Toch on the subject of teacher evaluation soon).

I also note that class size reduction, heavily favored and promoted by teachers unions, is on some unavoidable level at odds with the adequate base compensation agenda. There's only so much money; every dollar spent on hiring more teachers is a dollar not spent on paying indiviudal teachers more.